Hi,

You can use bit.ly for backlinks, but keep in mind, they are 301 redirects, so you lose a bit of link juice when search engines step through them.

If you chose to do this, you'll also want to tag the URLs before you shortlink them, otherwise your Google Analytics reporting will show all that traffic as Direct/(none) in the Channel report.

Hi,

First things first, it's a common misconception that the robots.txt disallow: / will prevent indexing. It's only indented to prevent crawling, which is why you don't get a meta description pulled into the result snippet. If you have links pointing to that page and a disallow: / on your robots, it's still eligible for indexation.

Second, it's pretty weird that the noindex tag isn't effective, as that's the only sure-fire way to get de-indexed intentionally. I would recommend creating an XML sitemap for all URLs on that domain that are noindex'd and resubmit that in Search Console. If Google hasn't crawled your site since adding the noindex, they don't know it's there. In my experience, forcing them to recrawl via XML submission has been effective at getting noindex noticed quicker.

I would also recommend taking a look at the link profile and removing any possible links pointing to your noindex pages, this will help future attempts at indexing.

Hi,

Generally speaking, any link that takes users off of your site should open in a new tab. If you send them away in the same tab, they're probably not coming back to your site. Especially with social media, they're likely to get distracted with something else and forget about what they were doing in the first place.

Stephanie,

YouMoz is a section of the blog completely dedicated to user generated content. Though it looks like they've paused submissions while they reconfigure some things regarding YouMoz and the Moz community.

Hi,

Your XML sitemap should only contain 'clean URLs'. By that I mean only 200 status URLs.

You should not have any redirects or error pages. You should also make sure you've got the preferred format; i.e. www vs. non-www and https vs. http.

Hi,

I wouldn't measure your copywriter based on WPM, I'd focus instead on the quality of the writing. I recommend measuring based on the performance of the content. Is it helping improve rankings? Driving traffic? Nurturing leads? Increasing sales? I don't know what your line of business is, but I would choose some KPIs by which you measure the effectiveness of the content being produced. It doesn't matter if it's 1 WPM if that creates 3x as much revenue as content that was written at 100 WPM.

Thanks for that clarification CleverPhD, forgot to mention that.

I just ran this query for bvstate URLs indexed for the H&R Block site. Mozbar shows canonical tags with bvstate in them, and Screaming Frog finds no canonical tags at all. There is a deeper issue that is not simply Google ignoring them.

Wanted to jump back in on this topic as I've just confirmed my initial suspicion.

I just added a new client to our Moz account and had the exact same issue, crawler unable to access the robots.txt file. It's a secure site and was configured in Moz without the HTTPS. When I go to the robots.txt file without https://www, it redirects to the same thing as yours where the / between the TLD and page path gets removed.

Reconfigure your site and it should begin to work.

Hi James,

As with most things in SEO, the answer is 'it depends'. If the only service you offer is 'campervan hire', I believe the homepage for that would work. Then, as you've already mentioned you do, have pages built out for more specifics terms like locations.

I think there are use-cases for using the homepage for some high-level, top of the funnel keywords that broadly describe a business. But for the most part, I do agree with the Yoast article, as it can be difficult to put content on the homepage of a site while maintaining the aesthetics of a homepage.

Greg,

Have you tried creating multiple XML sitemaps by section of the site, like by folder or by product detail pages? 70,000 is a huge amount of URLs and even if you could get them all on one sitemap, I wouldn't recommend it. Nesting sitemaps into an index sitemap can help Google understand your site structure and make it easier for you to troubleshoot indexing problems should they arise.

Hi,

According to this article, John Mueller says Google doesn't weigh URLs that heavily when determining rank. I always advise against changing URLs unless it's absolutely necessary, as you'll lose about 15% of the page's current PR when you redirect it.

This article also directly says to not change URLs for SEO purposes: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html

Hi there,

I haven't heard of using product markup on category pages until reading your question. It's a good idea and while researching I came across this other thread from a couple years ago: https://moz.com/community/q/google-rich-snippets-in-e-commerce-category-pages

My main concern is that most ecomm category pages have a lot of products showing by default, and if you've got a snippet of JSON+LD for each of those, you're going to hurt your page speeds. Just something to be mindful of and monitor if you do decide to go this route.

Skyler,

You're close, give this a shot:

Disallow: /*?utm_

This will be inclusive of all UTM tags regardless of what comes before the tag or what element you have first.